October 2013

Monday, 21 October 2013

Now that the “non-essential” parts of the government have
returned to work can we please move on to repair the untold financial damage –estimated
as much or more than $24 billion - and personal hardships (a recent poll
showed 44% of American families said they were adversely affected by the
shutdown:the rest of us on the
sidelines were just appalled) caused by the 2013 reenactment of the rebel South
rises again only to get squashed (again)?

And can we please forgo another embarrassing
round of two year old temper tantrums staged in front of the world media in less
than four months’ time by publicity seeking hounds in the Senate and House? Obama
1 – Cruz – 0 by the way.

Meanwhile, would the scions of the Grand Old Party (GOP) please
figure out how to compete in elections without caving in to an outlier hard
right movement that strategically burst onto the scene prior to the 2010
elections garbed in 18th century dress especially designed for Fox
News prime time?

Here’s one – among many - fundamental dilemmas the GOP needs
to address: Corporate interests and its Republican populist rural America
supporters do not make a healthy or even a sensible mix.Corporations are established to make money
for their owners and stock holders.Populist America does not have the spare change to invest in
corporations and hence to partake of the corporate bounty.

So where’s the convergence of interests?

I’ve seen numerous charts and correlations depicting the
strengths of the Tea Party in the US.Its core is in the Confederate South, mostly in rural areas, and it is
far more attractive to aging white male marginally educated voters who dominate
those and other largely rural regions of the country. But I think that there is at least one other
related yet important factor.

The Missing Stats

What I’m missing is a correlation between Tea Party
supporters, military veterans and our outsized defense budget but I’ll bet that relationship exists.Look, for example, outside the South at
the Tea Party’s inordinate strength in Colorado Springs – the home of the Air
Force Academy and, by the way, the Evangelical Christians who surround and
infiltrate the academy at the nation’s expense.

It’s rather like looking at the statistics that demonstrate the strong correlation between high cancer rates and the preponderance of oil and
gas refineries in certain areas – think northern New Jersey and Houston, Texas
as for instances.

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

In the New York Times best seller The Black Swan:the Impact of the Highly Improbable(Random House 2010) its author Nassim
Taleb argues that what we don’t know is likely to be far more relevant that
what we do particularly with respect to significant – and unpredicted –
“black swan” or rare but transformative events like the Arab Spring, 9/11 or even
the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Russian and Ottoman Empires. (Two black swans on a lake at Myrtle Beach, May 2013 by PHKushlis)

A little further on in his book, Taleb
cautions that the human brain too often focuses on the minutiae rather than the
infrequent but life changing momentous events; therefore, blinding us to the forest for the
trees, catching us unawares, throwing us off balance and unprepared for a
radically different future because we fail to realize that “Black Swans “can be
caused and exacerbated by their” unexpectedness.

But why are so many unexpected?

If we’d only put the
pieces together before the fact, perhaps we could have averted 9/11 – but we
didn’t.The signs were there. The few
who had done so - or at least had reason to be suspicious - were stove-piped out of existence and their
words of warning ignored by their supervisors.

Or the US government at its highest levels may have known that the
possibility that a black swan event was on the horizon – like the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991 – but our leaders were so focused on trying to prop
up a reasonably friendly but failing regime they failed to consider the range
of alternative future directions. The record shows, however, they had been warned.

An eclectic short reading list

A few days ago, a friend asked me for a few book recommendations.I thought briefly and suggested Taleb’s The
Black Swan (which I am still reading) and Dan Balz’s Collision 2012.

Collision 2012 is a highly rated analysis of the US 2012
national elections by Dan Balz, a veteran political reporter and elections observer from
the Washington Post.

I should also have added Orlando Figes, Natasha’s
Dance:A Cultural History of Russia
(Henry Holt, 2002) to this eclectic short list but didn’t.I thought I knew a fair amount about Russian
culture but Figes – whose book I discovered thanks to my son who had left an
unread copy on a book shelf – demonstrated how little I did know.

What If?

In Natasha’s Dance, Figes argues that the momentous
events of 1917 had been set into motion by Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia
because of its overwhelming effect on the Decembrists – a group of young elite Russian
officers who revolted against the Czarist regime on December 14, 1825. These men
had fought in the Imperial army.They
and the Russian winter successfully defended the crown and homeland against the
French invaders.The Russian war effort
succeeded but the Decembrist's subsequent revolt failed, the leaders ended with long prison
sentences in Siberia but their personal experiences in the war had forever
altered their perceptions of Russia, Russian governance, Russia’s role in the
world and the Russian people.

The Decembrists had brought winds of change to the sleeping Russian
heartland – or at least to the intellectuals and members of the Russian
aristocracy.The rest of the next
century was dominated by the Czarist government’s reactions to the new social ideas
let in by the French invasion.

Yet, what if, Napoleon had let sleeping dogs lie and not
attempted to conquer Russia?Or what if
the French Revolution of 1789 had not ended in the “Reign of Terror” which
resulted in the ascendancy of Napoleon and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars?If any one of these “black swan” events had
been predicted and averted, how different would the face of Europe look
today?

Would nationalism have even come
to Russia?To Eastern Europe?To the Ottoman Empire?To Germany? Would World War I or II have ever
happened?Would there have been a
Communist controlled Soviet Union to collapse in 1991?Would Tchaikovsky have composed the 1812
Overture?Or Mikael Bulgakov written the
anti-Stalinist novel The Master and Margarita which was published in 1940?

Or might Mitt Romney have won the 2012 election for
president if his campaign had understood and harnessed the power of the social
media effectively or taken the pulse of American voters more accurately?Romney was so sure he had won that he didn’t
even write a concession speech – but why was he so blind to something the Obama
campaign had harnessed so well? Or would it have mattered?

Were these events – and others like the great recession of
2007 – inevitable or could they – with better foresight - have been averted and
the course of history changed?

Meanwhile, history
has not ended.It is being played out
every day.Is it even possible to
protect against black swan events or - given life's apparent randomness - should we even try?

Friday, 04 October 2013

Yes, Matilda, there is a clear relationship between the
administration of the State Department and America’s ability to conduct its foreign
policy successfully.

I don’t know how many times it needs to be repeated before
it registers on the Hill, at the NSC and on the hustings but US national
security - the conduct of US foreign relations with friend and foe - does not
simply equate to sending in the troops or bombing the offending opponent to
smithereens.There are far less
expensive and usually more effective options that the US has underutilized,
ignored or just plain forgotten.

One important reason
for the latter is that in State's rush to apply the “up or out” principle to
the Foreign Service which, since the law's adoption in 1980, has not only shorted the
US government of considerable foreign policy expertise but is more applicable
to combat troops in war zones paid to engage in hand-to-hand
combat as a part of their jobs rather than in the more cerebral conduct of diplomacy on the world’s
complex multi-dimensional chessboard.

When diplomats need to go to work in combat gear, my
friends, that's not diplomacy.

Yet, for diplomacy and other non-lethal forms in the US
foreign policy tool kit to succeed, the lead agency – namely the State
Department – also needs to function administratively like a well-oiled machine – not one that is
full of grit, grime, worn out parts and riddled with corruption as is the case
today.

That’s why it’s even more ironic that the one section of the
department immediately furloughed in the government shutdown on October 1 was State’s
inspector general’s office established to root out waste, fraud and corruption.

The good news is that
the Senate recently approved the administration’s appointment of Steve Linick as State’s
new Inspector General.The bad news, of
course, is that he will have little staff or budget to initiate investigations until the current political impasse is resolved.

Meanwhile, D.B. Grady
has written two excellent articles on administrative problems at State. These articles
have recently appeared in Clearance Jobs: Defense News & Career Advice. I highly recommend them – especially to those in
the IG’s office suddenly without staff or alternatively, a place to hang tennis
shoes or track suits during the work week. Grady who has previously written about State’s
administrative quagmire for The Atlantic should be commended for his thorough
reporting, ability to connect the dots and willingness to offer practical solutions.

Wednesday, 02 October 2013

Dr. Lois
Woestman, both a Greek and US citizen, is an External Funding Officer at
the University of Marburg, Germany and an independent research/policy advice
consultant for UN and international non-governmental agencies.

There was a hole in the clouds
as I biked along the Lahn river Monday, the day after elections were held here
in Germany. Like a wormhole, the sky-eye transported my mind back to Athens of
a bit over a year ago, when feelings were running high as Greeks were deciding
whether or not to remain in the Euro. The German elections, at least as they
appeared from my ground’s eye perspective in its heartland, could not have been
more different.

Greece stayed in the Euro. And
the eyes of many Greeks – as of many southern Europeans - turned toward France
and Germany, to see what the next step would be. Hopes of some growth policies
being added alongside austerity ones arose as France elected socialist PM
Hollande. And rumor had it that Germany might elect a new PM of similar
political leanings in its September 2013 elections, increasing the chances of
such an important shift in European approach to the crisis. The results of last
Sunday’s elections did not fulfill these hopes.

At federal level, Angela
Merkel’s right-center CDU party increased its share of the vote, almost obtaining
an absolute majority. The CDU here in state Hessen - where I live near
Frankfurt, the Wall Street of Germany - also increased its share of the vote. The
FDP, the CDU’s libertarian coalition partner, did not obtain the 5% required to
remain in the federal parliament, though it barely managed to remain in the state
Hessen government. Though its second worst showing since WWII, left-center SPD
also increased its share of the vote, but not enough to surpass the CDU. Both
federal and local SPD leaders rejected the possibility of forming a
“red-red-green” – SPD-Left-Green - coalition. Which has left the CDU the
challenge of forming a coalition with either the SPD, Link or Green
parties.

Why?

Why were most of my neighbors
and colleagues here in the German heartland so blasé about the elections? Why
did they cast their vote for a euro policy – a Europe - so far from that southern
Europeans had been hoping for?

One reason appears to be a desire
for political predictability, and realted disenchantment with the SPD. “Peer
Steinbrueck is too loud, too unpredictable. He lies, and is corrupt. His promises
cannot be trusted” argued Frank, a university researcher. For Frank, it
appeared difficult to disentangle perceptions of Mr. Steinbrueck’s political
style from SPD history. “It is more than that,” Frank went on. “We just settled
down here in Germany, you know. It was the SPD that began the destruction of
our health care system by introducing private health insurance, not the CDU.
The SPD cannot be trusted to be what they once were, so I cannot vote for them.
And, as someone born and raised in East Germany, you could not honestly expect
me to vote for the Left, now could you?”